Tag: Facebook

#Author Do you need a push for your campaign or promotion? Try Headtalk

Hi all:

If you recall, a few weeks back I wrote about the advantages of joining in multi-author promotional campaigns (read the post here) and one of them was the fact that you could learn from other authors.

Today, thanks to another multi-author event I’m taking part in (an audiobook giveaway for Thanksgiving), I’ve discovered something called HeadTalker. It seems to work in a similar way to Thunderclap (although I’ve never used Thunderclap), the idea being that you can set up a campaign, and ask other people to provide you support, via sharing on social media (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and LinkedIn, although they can choose to share everywhere or only on some of them). You have to choose a goal, a number of people who has to offer their support, and if you reach that number, then on a set name and time, your message (the campaign with the message you’ve chosen and the link you decide to use) will automatically be shared by all these people wherever they’ve chosen to share it. So it’s a good way to make a bit of noise (for instance if you’re organising an event, having a launch, a special promo, whatever).

Here is what my HeadTalker looks like:

A Time For Giving! Audiobooks

Have a go  yourselves, and of course, we’d all be very grateful if you could share and support. And just in case you want to visit the event itself, here is the link:

https://www.facebook.com/events/1090652230971258/

And don’t worry, it’s not me alone…

authors

So, have a go and see what you think.

Thanks so much for reading, and you know what to do, like, share, comment, and of course, CLICK!

Olga Núñez Miret

http://www.authortranslatorolga.com

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#Multi-author promotions. Reasons why you should be thinking about them #amwriting

Hi all:

I have taken up an external project with tight deadlines to work towards and that means sometimes I have to improvise more than I like, but I thought I could share a few thoughts on the possible benefits of joining in with other authors to promote your work, organize events, giveaways, etc.

Even if you’re a skilled marketeer (I am not), there are advantages to working as part of a team.

fall-into-romance-kindle-giveaway-large

In no particular order:

  1. You can share the organizing with others. Different events are organized differently, but it is possible to share and delegate responsibility for different parts of the event to different people, or you might just join in and follow instructions if you’re not a strong organizer.
  2. You can join forces and share skills to create a great event. You might be very good at visuals but not good at keeping track of lists, or setting up a Raffle copter giveaway. Rather than doing a bad job, you can each do what you’re best at.
  3. You can pull together your followers. A few months ago, when I had just started my own subscribers’ list and had very few followers, I joined in a giveaway with a group of authors where we could choose which link we wanted to promote. I chose the link to my list and I ended up with almost 800 subscribers. This works better when the giveaway is geared towards similar genres  to those you write in, or set up as multiple genres from the beginning, but you never know what might catch a reader’s attention.
  4. You can learn new things and join in events you might not have dared to organize by yourself. You might learn things and find out about resources you’d never used before, and you might dare to try things (within the safety of numbers) that you might not have wanted to do by yourself. (For example, I’d joined in several Facebook parties but only as part of the public, as I never thought enough people would attend just for me. If you are part of a group and know other authors from the same group will attend, you will feel more confident and dare to try new things. Yes, I eventually did participate in a Facebook author event. I did it!).
  5. You might be able to cover a wider geographical area and take advantage of promotions or options that are otherwise limited to certain markets. I have, on occasions, tried to organize giveaways or send gift cards and then realized that they were only open to authors with accounts in Amazon.com (let’s say). If the event or giveaway is run but international authors it will be possible to access the best options for the different markets and your knowledge base will cover a wider area.
  6. You will be able to afford bigger rewards and a varied choice of gifts and books that will make it more attractive to readers. If you take part in a lot of giveaways it can become expensive, especially if you want to offer something a bit costly. Joining in with other authors means you can offer bigger gifts without costing you the Earth.
  7. They can be a great way to make yourself known in  a new genre. If you’re writing in a new genre or market, joining in with other authors who are already known and have an audience with fans of the genre will open many doors for you.
  8. You might feel more comfortable talking about other people’s books also taking part in the event and sharing their achievements than blowing your own trumpet all the time. I forgot this one, that for me is one of the most important, on first writing the post, but I’ve added it on.

I’m sure you can think of many other reasons to join in with other authors, but those were just a few I thought up. And I wanted to show you, as an example, a giveaway I’m taking part in.

You can click here for more details. 

Thanks so much for reading, and remember to like, share, comment, and CLICK!

Olga Núñez Miret

http://www.authortranslatorolga.com

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LET LWI HELP YOU WIN!

14 days left of National Novel Writing Month. As a famous New Yorker that had some FRIENDS used to ask:

“How You Doin’?”

If you haven’t achieved your goal yet, then let LWI help you.

Win with L. W. I.

I’ll get that help out of the way first.

ASK TO JOIN OUR BRAND NEW TODAY FACEBOOK WRITERS GROUP:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/LitWorldInterviewsWritersGroup/

I will be there as often as I can to help you with:

  • Writing Sprints: Timed writing periods where you write as much as you can without editing or worrying about anything. Then you rest and we start again. I let rest happen or you tire out and give up.
  • Plot Needs: Do you need help with what a profession might do or a business practice is? I can help look it up quickly. I have even helped with what does a gun sound like to draw attention without it being fired or cocked or a bullet put in the chamber.
  • Encouragement: Sometimes you need someone to talk to. No, I won’t be there every moment, as I do have blogging and writing to do as well, but I will be there to do what I can.

I won’t tell you my word count but I’ll say this, you can’t base anything on the word count of someone else.

How can you get from where you are to 50,000 words?

I will tell you this, I hit 50,000 words in 8 days.  A lot of that came on a day on the weekend. That means you can do it in 14. Did I write every minute of the day? No. Did I write some of every hour? No.

I’ll repeat some of what I’ve advised before:

  • Don’t get bogged down in the details of what you are doing. Since this is a first draft and your goal is speed and word count, it isn’t about quality. In fact even if you were going for quality in a first draft, you would still end up doing at least drafts 2 and 3.

What does that mean?

  • WRITE!!!

Keep writing even if it doesn’t make sense. I wrote myself down paths I had no idea I was heading in and ended up using those directions to the story’s benefit.

  • LET THE CHARACTERS AND STORY WRITE THE STORY!!!

I’ll tell you one thing I did and still do, because I’m actually going through my novel and doing some detail work and research.

  • I like a certain show that has a lot of episodes on YouTube. So what I do is write for a while until I get a little tired and then I watch a YouTube episode. Then I return to writing.

Don’t want to get to that tired point?

  • Set a timer.  if your computer doesn’t have one then use one online.

http://onlineclock.net/

Do sprints using the alarm clock with or without friends. Sprints? Yes,  Do about 23 minutes and take 7 off, or you can do 26 minutes. You are thinking that is a lot of wasted time. Let me tell you something. If you do sprints where you take only 5 minute breaks your fingers are going to get so tired you will either end up having to quit OR you will be making so many mistakes you will get frustrated with your typing. I got to the point during sprints with a facebook group, which helped me get my word count, that my fingers didn’t want to move off of the keys to the other keys. It was awful.

I CAN ALSO POINT YOU TO OUR:

NaNoWriMo Support Category.

There you will find some NaNoWriMo Tips articles. One of which is:

5 WAYS TO MOVE AHEAD IN YOUR NOVEL.

Remember to ask to join the group and I’ll do what I can to help you win.

Much Respect

Ronovan

 

Ronovan Hester is an author, with his debut historical adventure novel Amber Wake: Gabriel Falling due out in December of 2015. He shares his life as an amnesiac and Chronic Pain sufferer through his blog RonovanWrites.WordPress.com. His love of poetry, authors and community through his online world has lead to a growing Weekly Haiku Challenge and the creation of a site dedicated to book reviews, interviews and author resources known as LitWorldInterviews.com.

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@RonovanWrites

© Copyright-All rights reserved by LitWorldInterviews.com 2015

Authors, be what authors need to be.

You’ll find hundreds of sites with advice about book promotion. We even have that advice here on Lit World Interviews. But what do you not find?

Ever heard of an actor named Haley Joel Osment? He saw dead people and was Murphy Brown’s and Forrest Gump’s. He was in a movie where Kevin Spacey played his teacher and had his Osment’s class come up with an idea to change the world. Osment took it seriously and went for it.

Ideas for publicity come from some strange places. I’ve tried here on LWI to get a ball rolling with no luck. It’s almost like having to write a query letter and getting the hook just right. Or making certain your first paragraph of the greatest novel ever written you spent ten years working on will pull in the reader and make them buy your book.

The hook, the bait, the paragraph wasn’t good enough, I suppose.

Big publishing companies have tons of authors. How much time do you think they put in for publicity for each author? Can you image how large a publicity department they would need? A great many of those authors end up doing their own publicity. They have as much clue as the average person when they start. And that book that took ten long years of love and sweat and divorce and celibacy to write ends up going nowhere.

Why? Because all those sites out there don’t tell you something. Don’t provide you something.

Do book blog tours. Have people review your book. Get online presence. Do this, do that. Great advice. Where do you start? How? How do you find these people?

Indie Authors, most Authors are broke, or closet to living check to check. We don’t even have the publicity person of a publishing house telling us we need to do something.

Authors Supporting Authors is what I call a Pay it Forward entity. The idea is hundreds of authors and author supporters end up involved. We become the publishing company publicity machine. How much does it take to click something, or post a prepared post by an author, or even at times read a free book given for a review?

But there is more to it than that. With authors actively being involved we can do things. We can build up lists of blogs with themes that are best for certain types of books. List what sites to go to for types of publicity ranging from free to OMOhNo-I-Ain’t-Paying-That. We can rate services. Put out warnings of scams.

A centralized hub for authors to go to and find what they need without the headache of having to search the internet for it all. Let’s put it all in one place.

I started the site last week. But I am not going to be the only one doing anything. You are as well. You will be providing the information more so than I will. You find something, comment about it. There will be threads to do things like that. You want to be an Author on the site? Email me at ronovanwrites@gmail.com. It doesn’t mean you will be given author access but you probably will if I know you or one of my friends does. Why the hesitancy? I have to trust because this is important.

I would like to have people who keep an eye on each type of promotional piece to make sure things are being found, comments are being taken care of and people requesting help with promotions are not overlooked.

That’s right. The most important part of ASA is you the author tells the community what you need and the idea is the community responds and helps with the idea of Paying it Forward. We all need help. Indie Authors and Authors in total are one of the largest companies out there. We need to start acting like it and doing something about it. There is room for all of us to have success.

By having one place to go to, we can organize and not conflict with each other if possible.

Will it take time to grow this? Only as much time as it takes each of you to get involved. Will it be perfect to begin with? No. But as soon as possible we will have something great in place we can ALL use. That includes me.

https://authorssupportingauthors.wordpress.com/

There’s the link. Click it. Follow. I’ll create a Suggestion Box Page where you can leave suggestions for promotion ideas, publicity, page ideas for the site.

There will be a Newsletter created.

Didn’t click the link yet?

Then click the image and get to work.

 

AuthorsSupportingAuthors

Let’s connect.

https://twitter.com/RonovanWrites

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Ronovan-Writes/630347477034132

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RonovanWrites/about

ronovan-profile-bw

 

 

 

 

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It’s Thunderclap Time for Author @AlienoraTaylor

http://thndr.it/1JDvCB9 Pay it forward for when you need help. It’s easy. It’s free. All you do is click it and forget it.

Authors Supporting Authors

‘The Lyre of Logres’ is my fifth novel and I have organised a Thunderclap (launching on April 27th) in order to promote it.

It is a book of forty-five short pieces, each relating, in some way, to the landscape. I use the lyre as a metaphor for Mother Earth, and Logres is used deliberately as it is the name of Britain’s Inner Landscape. My image is of a huge lyre which is acted upon by the emotions, actions and thoughts of mankind – and we all, by the way we behave, cause the strings to vibrate, producing songs haunting, sad, joyous, scary and so forth.
The stories are my songs to, and from, the Earth.
Alienora Taylor
Thank you,
Alienora Taylor
Alienora Taylor

© Copyright-All rights reserved by AuthorsSupportingAuthors.wordpress.com 2015

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Advertising Your Book

Most of the reading public are not part of writers social networks in any big way. They probably all have a personal Facebook or a Google+ presence, and quite a few people these days have Twitter accounts to see what the Kardashians world is up to. A lot of them are on the mailing lists of book recommendation sites though, and that’s why an important part of marketing should be popping your books up on them now and then in addition to your normal tweeting and sharing on your regular sites.

If you can afford trying for a listing on Bookbub then that’s a good option, but not only is it going to get more difficult to get accepted there now that traditional publishers are using it, it’s also quite expensive. That doesn’t mean you have to do all advertising yourself though. There are a couple of much cheaper options to go for, which while they might not pack the punch of Bookbub, they’re still going to get you more eyeballs on your books, and hopefully a couple of sales from new readers.

I have to say that I haven’t done any serious marketing for my books, so I wouldn’t even try and call myself an expert on selling books. I’ve always worked in marketing though, so I have a bit of an idea. From what I’ve seen so far, I think that the marketing of eBooks is actually the toughest job in the sales world – especially as an Indie scribbler trying to get noticed. It’s always been my plan to write three to five books before I got too involved in the selling of them, and over the past year or so I have been poking around and about for ideas for when I do. As a test, I’ve run one of my books a couple of times on the smaller sites expecting nothing at all to happen, and was really surprised when it actually got sales.

So when you’re ready to promote your books, I suggest that you prepare your strategy, choose your promo days, give yourself a budget for advertising, and put it on a few of the cheaper sites. Most of them require a specific amount of reviews in the upper star range, but not as many as you need for the bigger sites. I got the most sales when I ran African Me & Satellite TV on Choosy Bookworm, but also a couple from The Daily Bookworm, and a few from People Reads, who will also advertise your new release before it has any reviews.

When you’re finally ready to start selling your books, you really should be paying for advertising if you can afford it, and the three sites above have prices starting at eight bucks, so even if you don’t sell too many books to begin with you won’t be lining up for loans either. While our conventional marketing ourselves on Twitter and so on is vital, our aim should also be finding a portion of those millions of ravenous readers out there who don’t have a social network presence, but do subscribe to book mailing lists.

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Authors-Set Up your Web Presence.

One of the first things you will find out as an Author is that YOU ARE YOUR ADVERTISING. Agents and Publishers look at what your presence is online and how you are selling yourself. Don’t be offended at that word. Use the word marketing if you like.

The point is, you have to get attention in order to get attention. As soon as you realize you want to be an author start marketing. What are things you need to do?

Establishing your Network/Platform or whatever you want to call it.

Professionals will tell you to focus focus focus. Focus your energy on two or three media outlets and that’s it. Okay, I somewhat agree.

Today let’s talk about three of them:

  • Blog
  • Twitter
  • Facebook

What’s the best way to control your presence, your marketing, your portfolio and establish a home where everyone knows your name? You got it . . .

Your Blog

Some of you are freaking out. Don’t. You want to know why?

  • Blogs are free unless you want some super upgrade things
  • You only put on a blog what you want to
  • You can delete anything on your blog you don’t like

Why should you have a blog?

Let’s go ahead and establish first that you should go ahead and use your pen name as your blog address or URL. Blog address? Yes, that’s the http://www.whatever.com thing you type. The Title of your blog can be anything else. Like I could change the Title of this site to The Literary World of Interviews. It will change nothing in the way of how you find this site. But I prefer for the name of the site to be the same as the address, the URL address. Being the same is less confusing. And by being your name it will be easy to find you and it’s professional. You can also use the name of your book series. A friend of mine and her family have written a series, the second is out now. The trilogy is called The Seeds Trilogy and their site is very nice. It gives character profiles and a lot of things to help you really get into the atmosphere of the books. One of our Authors, PS Barlett has a nice Author Blog as well.

Your Blog, your official Author site should be professional. It should contain your work and the image you wish to project. Keep the unprofessional things off of there unless you just don’t care. I am not saying don’t have fun and share fun things, I am just saying be professional about what you post.

A Blog is also your central hub that all of your other social media spin off of.

That brings us to . . .

Twitter

I know you probably just don’t even want to think about it. It’s some alien monster beast that you don’t understand that speaks in hashtagonese but it’s easier than you think. And to be honest, you don’t have to do that much with it at first to get started. You can even connect it to your blog, very easily, and then everything you post on your blog would have a link to it sent to Twitter.

How important is Twitter to a literary type blog person? For this site, LWI, historically since it began the number one place we get people to come visit us from as of this writing is Twitter then WordPress Reader, Search Engines and Facebook. They are all very close in number but those are the top four. And those are the four ways I expect it to be at this moment. We have some great affiliated blogs that we receive quite a bit of traffic from as well.

Don’t just tweet about your books and your work. Tweet fun things, jokes, links to videos, interesting articles, anything. Also keep your image in mind. You don’t want to come off as some immature, racist, sexist punk. I apologize to you immature, racist, sexist punk Authors out there, you can tweet what you like. If you tweet just things about your work, you will lose people, followers. Look at Neil Gaiman. He has a great Twitter feed. He mentions other authors and even tweets funny things along with his work. His are some of the most humorous and window into his world tweets I have seen and it allows his followers to connect with him.

Facebook

Facebook, in all honesty, is not what it used to be but it is still worth the effort to have an Author page. You can also set anything you post on your Author page to go to Twitter as well. You can so things on facebook such as launch parties and you can even use it much like Twitter now with the use of hashtags. In case you are not familiar with hashtags that is when you see something like #FreeBooks or #LitWorldInterviews. You just put # in front of a uninterrupted series of words or word. And you are not limited to 140 characters as you are on Twitter, although, when/if your facebook post does go to Twitter the 14o characters does become a factor so your message will be chopped if it goes long. I let mine be chopped. I just put my hashtags at the beginning or in the message itself.

Facebook is where, if you have a blog, you want to post other things. You can still post your work. I put links to things on my blog on mine. But I also do videos, little joke images, or sometimes I will do poetry that I only post on facebook. I put things you would only see if you followed me on facebook. Again, not a difficult thing to do.

 

Believe it or not, you can schedule things to post on each of these media outlets. You can spend a couple of hours and set up a post a day or three posts for the week on your blog, if it takes that long. Tweets can be done the same, and facebook as well. You don’t have to be there and be active all the time, but you do want to respond to people who might comment to you. That’s up to you though. But fans do like some acknowledgement at times.

I will be getting into each of these in detail in separate articles, but for now I would advise anyone reading this that has even the remotest thought of becoming an author to go ahead and set these up. It does no harm. Go ahead and do it. I use WordPress.com for blogging. It’s free and very easy. I’ve tried others and this one really seems the easiest to me so far. It might just be a preference but I do like it, plus WordPress has a great Author community that really does support one another. You want proof? You’re reading the proof now. Authors united to help other authors and to promote their work. That’s right, we want everyone to be a success.

 

Until Next Time

Much Respect

Ronovan

Ron_LWI

 

 

 

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